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Tracking that’s so smart

There’s a surprisingly strong amount of suspicion, and wariness in the US/Silicon Valley towards the tech giants Facebook, Google, and other internet advertising companies. It’s way more than an outsider would expect. Firstly it’s already higher in US than other countries, and then again within the Silicon Valley-type, it’s even more intense.

As someone who just loves to the utility that Google products provided, it was quite confusing. Are these people just worked up over nothing? Are they competitors? Do they hate Google and Facebook because these two juggernauts are at competition with everyone else (eg Yelp)? Are Americans and Californian social justice warriors (SJW) just that into the entire privacy thing like they are into all kinds of bizarre activism that the rest of the world doesn’t really care as much about. Examples include US racial issues, marijuana usage, LGBT issues, and more.

I honestly still feel like amongst so many companies, at least Google keeps itself in check, and does more right than wrong. Compared to other companies. They have one important luxury – that of a good and high revenue and profit where they can choose to do the right thing, instead of prioritising profits. Example recent case in point – giving up Pentagon AI contracts to preserve their moral identity and continue to attract AI and engineering talent. It’s hard to take the moral high horse if you’re a startup trying to make every dollar it can, or if you’re in an average company who needs to be concerned about year to year revenue – ie the normal world that isn’t top 10 SV unicorns.

One of the greatest fears lately has always been people wondering if your phone is spying on you, whether the presence of people discussing a particular topic lead to the sudden appearance of related ads in your Facebook or ad pages even if you didn’t type it in. A lot of that is probably confirmation bias, but I pretty much guess now that it is the close geographic proximity (via location history) of you and your counterparts, and them doing the recent searches on their devices, that leads ad targeting to also suggest the same items to you. Nobody directly recorded your conversation (as wild a guess it is, I feel it’s way too much of an overstep for them to do it, too inefficient to record and parse everything), but it kind of seemed like it.

GDPR has the world in a mess, and the EU keeps dolling out fines and weird judgements. What will the advertising future look like? Would we ever go back to the straight up less-differentiated ads like print newspapers and tv channels? It was definitely also partly targeted, but less apparent, way less specific. But it didn’t require so much cookies and tracking over platforms.
No matter what, ads remain the most viable method of survival. You, me, anyone can’t keep paying subscription fees per source that we consume from. Over 100 news sources, over 100 applications are used in our lives, it’s economically impossible to subscribe to them all. And yet it’s odd because the marketing ad budget must have come from the things we pay for. So in a way we are still paying for the ad spend. Remember marketing costs go directly into the cost of goods sold to you. Less marketing = more value to you, usually.